


sometimes you don't need a kiss to know

by dotpyenji



Category: Dragalia Lost (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Drunkenness, M/M, Nursing, Pining, there's a lot of miscellaneous scenes here ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27559903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotpyenji/pseuds/dotpyenji
Summary: Out of all the residents in the Halidom, Norwin falls for the flirty idiot who may or may not be cursed.Love is sudden, unexpected, like rain at noon.
Relationships: Norwin/Orion (Dragalia Lost)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	sometimes you don't need a kiss to know

In most fairytales, the hero falls in love fast and dramatically. He locks eyes with the flaxen-haired princess and his cheeks flush bright with youthful desire. If it is midnight, the stars glimmer; if it is approaching dusk, the setting sun smiles warmly as it fades into deep blues. The wind whispers sweet nothings, and the hero is filled with blissful awe as he beholds the beauty before him.

Conversely, Norwin realizes the true nature of his feelings one lazy afternoon, while he and Orion loiter in the garden, sitting on the grass. He’s sketching the roses in the bush Orion had been painstakingly tending to for the past four weeks.

They’re lovely roses. Petals, a deep crimson. Much like red acrylic. Or blood.

He knows Orion is going to pluck the flowers, fashion them into a bouquet, and give them to a woman he just met. Hence he draws, to preserve the memory of these roses somewhere, before they inevitably end up in either a trash can or a married woman’s trash can.

Ten minutes into his sketch, Norwin realizes that Orion is uncharacteristically silent. He looks up and sees Orion staring at his drawing almost dreamily, lips curled into a half-smile.

It’s endearing.

It’s the first time Norwin ever thought of Orion as endearing.

Maybe it’s the way Orion’s eyes seem to brim with an almost childlike excitement, how his messy bangs sway in the breeze. How he looks like he’s mere inches away from flipping up his head and saying Norwin’s drawing looks quote-and-quote _romantic_ , because he’s terribly pretentious.

Orion’s the furthest thing from a fairytale princess. He’s no radiant maiden in silken trappings whose rescue is the driving force of the story, but the flirty mercenary who the hero meets in a downtrodden tavern while looking for party members.

But love isn’t always as it is on paper, yes?

And Norwin realizes that he’d cut off his drawing hand to be with this silly man for just a moment longer.

“Is there something on my face?” Orion asks quizzically.

Norwin blinks. He’d been staring.

“Ah—no.”

Orion said he didn’t plan on falling in love with any men. Norwin didn’t plan on falling in love at all, but he fell for Orion anyway.

///

_Lured to the water's edge by the ocean's song,_ he wrote _, our prince suddenly beheld the beautiful princess who lived in the deep._

A storybook meeting, if ever there was.

///

Norwin can’t remember how they first met.

Were they assigned the same chore? Fiend patrol duty? Perhaps Norwin simply heard the rumours of a skirt-chasing bodyguard on the loose. He cannot recall. However they met, it was uneventful.

Some friendships just happen. The stars align, the puzzle pieces of life slide into place, and you notice you’re talking to this one person much more than you would to the average stranger.

Not like he minds.

He’s a storyteller. He needs stories to tell, and Orion never runs out of stories to give him. They’re all romantically charged and almost always unintentionally comedic.

“—Then she dumped me,” Orion muttered bitterly one evening, as they sat at the dinner table, waiting for Cleo’s supper. “I thought we had something serious.”

Norwin sighed between the clinking of utensils around them. “Well, you _were_ dating her sister at the same time.”

Despite being sylvan, Orion reminded Norwin of a puppy; the sad little pout, the doleful eyes.

“But what was I to do? I’d fallen for both,” he cried in typical Orion fashion. Dramatically, as if in a stage play, he placed a hand over his heart.

Norwin was about to tell him to _stop chasing after love so obsessively, then,_ but the dinner bell rang, and all thoughts were lost to the exuberant yells of the hungry castle-dwellers around him.

///

Bravery often comes hand in hand with stupidity. In a fairy tale, this is necessary: some actions should defy logic in the name of hope. Unreasonable leaps of faith turn fruitful in the end. A king pins all his trust on an underdog hero, the princess believes in the bloodied, limping protagonist.

Orion, on the other, more realistic hand, is just…an idiot. Norwin turns this fact over in his head with a mixture of amusement and fondness.

Dating two people at once. Flirting with every woman who stumbles into his line of sight. Using himself as a meat shield to protect his charges, leaving deep wounds that drip onto his bedroom floor.

“Why?” Norwin asked once, as he tightened faded bandages around bleeding cuts on Orion’s forearm.

Orion had simply grinned, as if he hadn’t just thrown himself in front of a fiend to protect a slip of a client he ended up waiving the fee for.

“For love,” he’d whispered, as if that explained everything.

It did not explain anything.

Norwin (purposefully) pulled the bandages a little too hard.

Orion winced, eyes bleary.

“W-well—what if she was my _soulmate_?” He chuckled nervously. “You know, the curse and all.”

Norwin blinked.

“Pardon?”

“Oh, have I not told you yet?”

Norwin had heard of many a kind of curse on his various travels and in the nooks of story books. Cursed with an early death, with immortality, to live as a slimy frog until kissed on the lips—it was not uncommon for the brave hero of a tale, or the princess he is destined to be with, to be afflicted with some horrid spell, one to be undone with the power of true love, friendship or whatnot.

Orion’s, in comparison, felt…vague.

“I’m afflicted with a curse where I will die if I don’t fall in love with my soulmate.”

He paused, and raised an eyebrow at Norwin, as if to gauge his reaction.

Norwin knew him too well to play along.

“…Won’t you die even if you _do_ find a soulmate? Life is finite.”

The starkness of Norwin’s words made Orion flinch. Here come the puppy eyes, the little pout; Norwin held back a laugh.

“B-but!” Orion protested, ears drooping. “Norwiiiiiiiin…You know that’s not the same…”

“Heh.”

The bandages were neatly tied. Small drops of rain began to tap against the window pane, the sky outside a cool gray. Never mind the dark red stains on top of the older dark red stains that dotted the wooden floorbeams.

Orion did this a lot.

“…Is there really a curse?” Norwin asked.

Orion’s eyes lit up like a Dragonyule tree.

“Yes!”

“Then—“

“And I’m not the only one inflicted by it—we all are. A life without love is no life at all! If we don’t fall in love with our destiny—"

A sigh.

A deep, deep sigh. One from the dark depths of Norwin’s heart.

“Since when were you a philosopher?”

///

Surprisingly, Drunk Orion is much less philosophical than Sober Orion.

The tavern was closing. Norwin, who had emptied two bottles of wine, turned to Orion, who’d taken half a sip.

“We ought to get back.”

“Mmmghaah,” Orion replied, barely lifting his head from the counter.

The air was sticky, and smelled of cheap beer and broken glass. At the other end of the counter, two female Rokkans, faces flushed, squabbled over the bill. A burly human in an alcohol-stained apron eyed them warily.

“It’s two in the morning.” Norwin tapped Orion’s shoulder.

“Five…f-five more minutes, Granny.”

“I’m not your—don’t you have a client to escort soon?”

“Snzz…”

“Cleo’s waiting for us.”

“…”

In his best storytelling voice, Norwin said: “Cleo, and all the other _fair maidens_ of the Halidom, are waiting for the ever- _charming_ Orion to grace them with his presence.”

Orion grumbled into the tabletop like a kid being told to eat his vegetables.

“Cleo…can wait. Mm.”

The nearby Rokkans agreed to split the bill 20-80. Norwin cocked his head.

…Not even _that_ worked? Waike had warned him that Orion was a lightweight, but this was just absurd. He tried to think of something that would motivate his very drunk companion to at least sit up and say coherent sentences.

“The curse,” he whispered, half to himself.

One of Orion’s ears twitched.

“Granny? Don’t wanna…go t’school…”

Triumphantly, Norwin faced Orion and tugged one of his dark green ears teasingly.

“Your _curse,_ Orion. Don’t you want to meet your soulmate?”

He expected his half-conscious friend to stand to attention and start a fervent sermon on love and destiny and how life without romance isn’t worth living at all. _I’m cursed, we’re all cursed, everyone needs to find love,_ so on and so forth, rambling like a white-bearded Ilian priest in silken garments standing at a cracked marble pulpit.

Instead, there’s a defeated grunt. Orion turned his head, locked eyes with Norwin. For a split second Norwin caught sight of something deeper.

Something…broken?

Then Orion fell asleep. Norwin had to carry him back to the Halidom.

Ilia, was he heavy.

///

Norwin wonders what kind of love Orion holds within his heart.

There’s the romantic love so often championed in fairytales, all blushes and yearning. It’s the intimate, idealistic love found in the pocketbook Elisanne dropped in the hallway. It’s the love Orion is so fond of expressing to whatever poor girl wanders into his line of sight; a love full of symbols and gestures and tropes, of honey and candies and flowers doomed to die.

Then there’s the kind of love Norwin has for the town of Anasonne. It’s bittersweet, held in sweaty palms in the dead of night after waking from a nightmare of charred flesh and heavy smoke. But it’s a love he wouldn’t give up for anything.

Orion is back to his regularly-scheduled skirt-chasing. The fractured look in his eyes is long gone, but Norwin thinks about it often.

Perhaps they’re not so different, after all.

///

How long has it been since Anasonne disappeared into greedy flames and the rhythmic cadence of military boots? Five years, a decade? It could have been a century. The pain is the same.

Reactions don’t vary much.

_I’m sorry to hear that happened._

_That’s terrible._

Pity, coated with sugar and oil paint. It’s a placebo, faulty medicine. Bandages the size of a pinky finger taped onto a broken ribcage, prayers offered to a false god.

Norwin knows only time can heal his trauma, but as to _how_ much time, he cannot say.

Orion’s the first person who, upon hearing his story, doesn’t wax poetic on sympathetic elegies.

“A café just opened downtown,” he offers instead. “Want to come with?”

An eyebrow is raised. The sketch of the rose bush sits obediently in Norwin’s lap as the sun begins to set. He catches glimpses of that same enigmatic brokenness he spotted in Orion’s eyes back in the tavern, except this time sober and, somehow, understanding.

“I thought you only escorted women.” Norwin says.

Orion huffs softly.

“It has a mini-library.”

They go to the café for dinner.

///

Can you fall in love with someone you don’t know everything about?

Orion would probably say yes.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to get over the writer's block I was having while writing an entirely different fic. hoo boy
> 
> Also: the line about Norwin writing a scene between a princess and the prince, and Orion's little philosophical speech about how everyone is cursed and life without love is worthless blah blah blah: both lines are ripped straight from their respective Adventurer stories. They actually say those things. Thought I should mention it.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the fic!


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